1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods useful in identifying a computer user and the user's demographic and other user specific information from his or her activities on the computer, particularly from the user's activities on a network, as well as differentiating between user requested data and automatically generated data.
2) Brief Description of the Related Art
Knowing the actual identity of a computer user can be invaluable for many reasons. As explained herein below, when a user accesses the Internet, for example, identification information relating to the computer or the software may be available over the network, and user input information, such as a login name, might be available at times. However, this information may not identify the actual user and user identification does not always accompany requests for webpages, and the like. Even when user identification information is provided in a communication, such as when using AOL and CompuServe, this information is generally limited to a user's e-mail address or a user name, rather than an actual name or user's identity. Sometimes a user-defined profile is available as well. However, this limited information is not available and does not often provide enough useful information about the user, particularly when the user may have multiple accounts each with their own distinct user-defined profile, for instance. It is particularly disadvantageous when trying to derive user demographic information for market research.
The granularity of market research largely depends on the accuracy of the consumer demographics being reported with the consumer's market activities.
Consumer decision-making has been a focus for many years. Companies that are attempting to meet a particular need in the marketplace, or that are attempting to find out how products or services are being received by the consumer, will often conduct market research to attempt to quantify attributes or characteristics of a particular consumer segment. If performed well, the data extracted from this research can inform companies about how their and others' products or services are perceived and bought by purchasers or potential purchasers in the marketplace, and how the companies' products or services can be changed to achieve the companies' business goals.
Traditionally, this information is segregated into demographic categories, such as age, gender, martial status, income bracket, education level, etc. A problem common to general protocols for performing consumer-oriented market research is collating consumers' activities and spending habits to the consumers' demographic profiles. Surveys, whether in person, by mail or the Internet, usually include inquiries about a person's relevant demographic information when inquiring about the person's buying habits and/or the market research information. However, for Internet-activity monitoring, the process of asking the user to provide this information is cumbersome.
Internet-activity monitoring includes a server-side consumer data collection strategy in which an individual Internet content provider (“website”) monitors and collects data about each consumer who has requested data from (“visited”) the website, and then compiles this data about all the consumers who have visited that website.
Alternatively, or additionally, data collection directly from an Internet consumer's computer has also been proposed, i.e., client-side data collection. Such systems commonly involve installing a software application onto the consumer's computer, which operates at the same time as Internet browser application software. The software then collects data about the consumer's Internet usage, e.g., which websites the consumer has visited. The data is then uploaded to a data-collecting computer on the Internet.
Yet another strategy is to have the user's Internet-activity pass through an intermediary domain having server or servers which monitor all of a user's activities by tracking and filtering the requests and replies between the user and content providing servers and proxy servers, as detailed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/532,890, filed Mar. 22, 2000, herein incorporated by reference.
A challenge for each of server-side, client side and intermediary server-side systems is to collect and relate data about the consumer, such as age, income level, marital status, and other demographic, economic, and personal information to the user's activities, which would allow the data to be compared with consumer databases from other sources, without noticeably affecting the user's experience.